Wednesday, October 13, 2010
14 October 2010 dinosaur
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
29 September 2010
Yesterday was the first time I drove some place that I had never been (i.e. by having someone else take us there). I looked on the map, and decided to explore some of the touristic charms of Ayutthaya off the "island". Those of you on Facebook can see an album i posted there.
Ayutthaya city, capital of the province where I live, was the capital of Thailand for four hundred years or so, ending in 1767 (I think) when the invading Burmese torched and sacked the place. The Thai response was basically to get up and move, since the city was uninhabitable. They moved to Thonburi for a short while, then across the river to the current capital, Bangkok.
As far as I understand, it never occurred to the Thai that Ayutthaya's ruins were a treasure trove, until the fifth king of the current (Chakri) dynasty, known in English as King Chulalongkorn (successor to his father, King Mongkut, the king of "The King and I"), started work to restore it. I think it may have been as a result of visiting the west and seeing how they preserved and respected old treasures. The Thai respected their treasures, but apparently didn't know a ruined city was one. Well, that was a hundred or so years ago. There is now an endless supply of things to see on the island (I guess about 9 square miles) which was the location of the capital, as well as off the island in all directions. The more modern part of Ayutthaya now lies to the east of the island. In 1991 Ayutthaya was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Yesterday we visited Wat Chai Wattanaram, a ruin with a lot of remaining structure and statuary, though in poor condition. It sits on the river, in a gorgeous location. It's a huge complex for having just been a temple. Next we went to St Joseph's church, founded by the French a few hundred years ago, but also succumbing to a blaze, and rebuild in the 19th century. Didn't get a chance to go inside, but it's lovely and the grounds are lovely. It has a school attached to it.
After that we went to Wat Putthaisawan, further down the river a short ways, with two boat landings on the temple grounds, and finally the Portuguese settlement, which is basically an archeological ruin with one special treat.... a building housing a lot of skeletons basically "baked" onto concrete slabs. Unfortunately there is nothing further left of the settlement of the first Europeans to appear in old Siam. This site was restored in the past twenty years thanks to the Thai government, the Portuguese embassy, and the Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal's greatest cultural benefactors).
Getting to these places was interesting. Signage is a bit whimsical on streets, but we found what "had to be " the right road to the first place, and just followed it along with my nose. It is amazing how "out in the country" we were along these roads. The roads were very good, but you certainly felt like you were in the middle of nowhere. Somehow we managed to find everything. We were on our way to cross the river downstream about 3 miles, to come up the other side and visit the Japanese and Dutch settlements, but didn't make it yesterday. Another trip. There is enough to keep us busy without going more than 25 miles from home here. Here's one picture of Wat Chai Wattanaram.
Ayutthaya city, capital of the province where I live, was the capital of Thailand for four hundred years or so, ending in 1767 (I think) when the invading Burmese torched and sacked the place. The Thai response was basically to get up and move, since the city was uninhabitable. They moved to Thonburi for a short while, then across the river to the current capital, Bangkok.
As far as I understand, it never occurred to the Thai that Ayutthaya's ruins were a treasure trove, until the fifth king of the current (Chakri) dynasty, known in English as King Chulalongkorn (successor to his father, King Mongkut, the king of "The King and I"), started work to restore it. I think it may have been as a result of visiting the west and seeing how they preserved and respected old treasures. The Thai respected their treasures, but apparently didn't know a ruined city was one. Well, that was a hundred or so years ago. There is now an endless supply of things to see on the island (I guess about 9 square miles) which was the location of the capital, as well as off the island in all directions. The more modern part of Ayutthaya now lies to the east of the island. In 1991 Ayutthaya was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Yesterday we visited Wat Chai Wattanaram, a ruin with a lot of remaining structure and statuary, though in poor condition. It sits on the river, in a gorgeous location. It's a huge complex for having just been a temple. Next we went to St Joseph's church, founded by the French a few hundred years ago, but also succumbing to a blaze, and rebuild in the 19th century. Didn't get a chance to go inside, but it's lovely and the grounds are lovely. It has a school attached to it.
After that we went to Wat Putthaisawan, further down the river a short ways, with two boat landings on the temple grounds, and finally the Portuguese settlement, which is basically an archeological ruin with one special treat.... a building housing a lot of skeletons basically "baked" onto concrete slabs. Unfortunately there is nothing further left of the settlement of the first Europeans to appear in old Siam. This site was restored in the past twenty years thanks to the Thai government, the Portuguese embassy, and the Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal's greatest cultural benefactors).
Thursday, September 9, 2010
10 sep 2010
On another note, I am now a Thai driver. You may have already read about my experience getting my driver's license. I just got my car, and have eased into driving on the left side of the road. Actually, it's quite easy and virtually intuitive. What is NOT intuitive is trying to back up, since I have to turn my head in the opposite direction to what i'm used to to. Backing up is a valuable skill here because all places with mall-style parking feature back-in parking. The aisles are a bit narrow, so everyone backs in to get out more easily. When I get a chance, I'll show you a special feature of thai mall parking: double-parking and leaving your car for people to push it out of the way. But I'll describe it here, because in fact the car is specially equipped to be set up for this! Next to the gear shift, there is a place to insert the car key! With the car turned off, you insert this key and pull the car into neutral. In this way, if you double park, blocking people who are parked in the actual spaces, they will very carefully push your car out of the way, and pull out of the space. This would never work in the US with people screaming "don't touch my car" and also people not being quite so careful about things. You have to see it to believe it. It's almost a tourist attraction, I think.
So far my longest drive (the day after I got the car) was a trip to Ayutthaya proper, about 30 minutes, mostly on quiet country highways, one a white-knuckle road (the one that goes by my house), with one lane in each direction and people pulling out to pass. The other road, about 20minutes of the trip, is a divided highway and later just a city street. I even managed to fill the gas on the way back. There are all kinds of fuel here, including E20 (from vegetable oil; usable in my car but not best performance), Diesel 85, LPG, NGV (most buses, and some people add a second fuel tank of NGV to their cars; it's dirt cheap, but kind of scary), "gasohol" 91 and gasohol 95. I am recommended to use 91 or 95, with 95 the best option. That is one lot of octane!!! 95 costs about 30 baht a litre, about 95 cents a litre, which is probably about $3.50 a gallon or so. Not cheap. NGB is only about 8.50 and LPG 10.50. Absolutely no self service here, but a tip is not expected at the gas station, though "keep the change" rounded up is common, I think. At least that's what I do!
Okay, ready to drive in Thailand?
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
31 aug 2010
I guess every farang in thailand writes this story, but nobody I know has read it before, so here goes: today I got my thai driver's license. It was both simple and byzantine, in a truly thai way. First of all, to get a thai license, you have to have some proof of where you live, in the form of a "house regisration" and a national ID card. But there is one problem: as a farang you can't have either of those. Almost Catch 22, but not quite. The first step, learned by some accident or other, I found out the US Embassy can give you a sworn notarized affidavit stating your local residence. That requires, in my case, a trip into BKK after making an appointment online. The US consulate (separate from the embassy) is a zoo. At any given moment there are 150 thais trying to get some kind of visa for the US. Citizens are helped separately, which makes it marginally faster, typically with about 2 dozen Americans waiting, mostly older, fattier and uglier than me. First you get a form, then you go to pay. The fee is US$50, payable in baht. As an Aussie acquaintance in the same situation pointed out, it is against Aussie and US law to refusw to take our national currencies, since the embassies are sovereign territory, but go tell that to Obama.
So having paid your $50 in baht, you wait some more, and finally they have you swear you are telling the truth and give you your document.
You now go and make aeveral copies of your passport ID pages and visa pages, your international driver's permit, and head for the thai DMV. Fortunately you don't have to go to Bangkok, so went to the local "DMV" in Ayutthaya. it's well organized and efficiently run, but that doesn't make it easy.
At the reception of the driver's license bureau, a very attractive lady (w her 2 year old daughter sitting next to her) did "triage", inspecting my documentation and declaring it all good except for my lack of a doctor's certificate of health. She recommended a nearby clinic, and kept my passportn telling me she would be responsible for it.
So off we went to the clinic. They took my passport number (I had another copy w me), and soon took me in to see the doctor. She lightly pressed a stethoscope on my chest for one second, and told me I was done. I got my form and went back to the DMV. It was now about 11 am. They returned my passport, having done nothing with it, and gave me a 1 pm appointment for the VERY comprehensive eye exam.
We killed the tinme in a nearby Tesco Lotus and went back. About 30 of us were ushered into a large room and asked to line up at the first station. It was an eyechart consisting of red yellow and green dots of different sizes, and they would point at sifferent dots and you had to say the color. This is probably funnier if you know I'm red/green colorblind. Somehow I passed. On to station two, the station of death. It's a test of your colo peripheral vision. You put you nose on a platformand look straight ahead. The examiner flashes red green and yellow lights on either side of your head at nearly 90 degrees. You needed to be a parrot to see it. I failed! But later I retested and either guessed right, or he took pity on me.
Stations three and four are together. First there are two rods and you have to move them until they are at the same depth from you. It's not hard. And built into the same machine is the test of your reaction time. You step on a gas pedal, and when the light turns red, you jam on the breaks, and can see fromna stream of lghts how fast you are. The first time I jammed the break so hard I shot it across the room. The second time my reaction time was excellent. So I passed.
Now downstairs where a clerk had no idea what to do w me and immediately called her supervisor who wanted to see my work permit. WeLl I don't have one, because I am not authorized to work in Thailand. Eventually she accepted the fact, and then was upset that the consulate hadn't given me my document in thai. However, she made herself feel better by asking me to make several additional copies elswehere in the building. Finally, she called me over, took my picture, extracted 100 baht for the pictur and 100 baht for the license, and in less than a minute my license was dome. By this time the cranky employees were smiling and looking at pictures of my daughter and asking me how I liked thailand. It was now about 2.30, but we were done. I have a 1 year license, which will be reissued for 5 years when I go through this rigamarole next year. So simple
So having paid your $50 in baht, you wait some more, and finally they have you swear you are telling the truth and give you your document.
You now go and make aeveral copies of your passport ID pages and visa pages, your international driver's permit, and head for the thai DMV. Fortunately you don't have to go to Bangkok, so went to the local "DMV" in Ayutthaya. it's well organized and efficiently run, but that doesn't make it easy.
At the reception of the driver's license bureau, a very attractive lady (w her 2 year old daughter sitting next to her) did "triage", inspecting my documentation and declaring it all good except for my lack of a doctor's certificate of health. She recommended a nearby clinic, and kept my passportn telling me she would be responsible for it.
So off we went to the clinic. They took my passport number (I had another copy w me), and soon took me in to see the doctor. She lightly pressed a stethoscope on my chest for one second, and told me I was done. I got my form and went back to the DMV. It was now about 11 am. They returned my passport, having done nothing with it, and gave me a 1 pm appointment for the VERY comprehensive eye exam.
We killed the tinme in a nearby Tesco Lotus and went back. About 30 of us were ushered into a large room and asked to line up at the first station. It was an eyechart consisting of red yellow and green dots of different sizes, and they would point at sifferent dots and you had to say the color. This is probably funnier if you know I'm red/green colorblind. Somehow I passed. On to station two, the station of death. It's a test of your colo peripheral vision. You put you nose on a platformand look straight ahead. The examiner flashes red green and yellow lights on either side of your head at nearly 90 degrees. You needed to be a parrot to see it. I failed! But later I retested and either guessed right, or he took pity on me.
Stations three and four are together. First there are two rods and you have to move them until they are at the same depth from you. It's not hard. And built into the same machine is the test of your reaction time. You step on a gas pedal, and when the light turns red, you jam on the breaks, and can see fromna stream of lghts how fast you are. The first time I jammed the break so hard I shot it across the room. The second time my reaction time was excellent. So I passed.
Now downstairs where a clerk had no idea what to do w me and immediately called her supervisor who wanted to see my work permit. WeLl I don't have one, because I am not authorized to work in Thailand. Eventually she accepted the fact, and then was upset that the consulate hadn't given me my document in thai. However, she made herself feel better by asking me to make several additional copies elswehere in the building. Finally, she called me over, took my picture, extracted 100 baht for the pictur and 100 baht for the license, and in less than a minute my license was dome. By this time the cranky employees were smiling and looking at pictures of my daughter and asking me how I liked thailand. It was now about 2.30, but we were done. I have a 1 year license, which will be reissued for 5 years when I go through this rigamarole next year. So simple
Saturday, August 28, 2010
14 August
Those of you who knew our house in Alhambra know that across the street was a wall, the wall dividing us from the freeway. It was almost the wall that divided us from selling our house, as some people were afraid of freeway noise. It was a non-issue for us for 21 years.
And now we live across the street from a wall again. This wall divides us from... Nothing. Open fields and a forest a few hundred meters further up. The only noise is the birds, for the most part, the wind when it gets heavy, and the one car an hour that comes by, usually some workmen inside the community or security picking up/dropping off in their golf carts.
It just struck me, somehow, that we wound up with a wall again. We have a neighbor to our right, and 2 open plots next to us on the left, tho I think someone purchased them. Rumor (facts are hard to come by) has it that they will leave the plot closest to us as a garden, and build their house on the next plot. That will be good for us.
One more note: We have been defeated by rural transportation, or the lack thereof. It looks like we are going to have to buy a car. It will make our lives much easier, if not simpler. Oh well.
And now we live across the street from a wall again. This wall divides us from... Nothing. Open fields and a forest a few hundred meters further up. The only noise is the birds, for the most part, the wind when it gets heavy, and the one car an hour that comes by, usually some workmen inside the community or security picking up/dropping off in their golf carts.
It just struck me, somehow, that we wound up with a wall again. We have a neighbor to our right, and 2 open plots next to us on the left, tho I think someone purchased them. Rumor (facts are hard to come by) has it that they will leave the plot closest to us as a garden, and build their house on the next plot. That will be good for us.
One more note: We have been defeated by rural transportation, or the lack thereof. It looks like we are going to have to buy a car. It will make our lives much easier, if not simpler. Oh well.
31 July
Well, now we're here "for real", and we got right into action. The second day we spent about 4 hours at HomePro. It's a kind of mix of the non-industrial parts of Home Depot w a good dose of IKEA and the home appliance dept of a large department store thrown in. It's not equally strong at everything it undertakes, but it's a remarkable store. What makes it most remarkable are the employees. They are (sorry guys, the women more than the men) virtual encyclopedias of their areas. Plus as we went from department to department, we had a retinue of employees following us. The staffing is the opposite of US stores: you can ALWAYS find someone to help you. Actually, they'll find you. Not all stores are like this, but the service is usually excellent. Everyone we dealt with there knew the answers.
And when we were done, since we had a rather complicated purchase, they sat us down at a table in the special orders department and plied us w water and coffee while waiting to figure everything out.
Okay, truth is, I would rather have been at a bookstore.
And when we were done, since we had a rather complicated purchase, they sat us down at a table in the special orders department and plied us w water and coffee while waiting to figure everything out.
Okay, truth is, I would rather have been at a bookstore.
18 August 2010 Creepy story alert
There are certain notable moments in our lives that we usually don't forget. We don't remember our circumcision (well, you know who you are!), our first steps, proudly standing up and promptly whacking our heads on the coffee table. But we might well remember our first day at school, our first home run, goal, our first trip in an airplane, our first kiss.. okay that's enough.
One thing I never thought to remember happened a few hours ago. I've spoken before of jingjoks, little lizards that love Thai houses. My friend Elsie from South Africa assures me they are geckos, but they don't look at all like the Geico mascot nor do they have Australian accents. Anyway, I don't know how they existed before people were here, because they love the inside walls of houses. I mistakenly thought that was limited to old Thai style wooden houses, fairly open to the elements. Well it turns out they like stone, brick and plaster just fine. They are by no means a plague, but occasionally you'll encounter one in the house, from less than an inch long up to 6 inches.
While they have some kind of suction to hang onto walls and even ceilings, occasionally they get distracted, or sweaty, or somehow lose their grip. This seems to embarrass them and as for us, well... Today at our friends house, where we still have our food (fridge coming Monday), I was closing the front door from the inside when something bounced off my head, shoulder and the floor, scampering away, all 5 inches of him/her. Only one of us screamed.
Actually, I didn't mind, since they are totally harmless (not to insects), my only concern that he/she had not shat on my head. In fact he hadn't, so, no harm no foul. They crap in neat little cylinders. Fortunately there are none on our floor, so there will be no picture.
At any rate, it was an experience neither "Jimmy" nor I will soon forget.
One thing I never thought to remember happened a few hours ago. I've spoken before of jingjoks, little lizards that love Thai houses. My friend Elsie from South Africa assures me they are geckos, but they don't look at all like the Geico mascot nor do they have Australian accents. Anyway, I don't know how they existed before people were here, because they love the inside walls of houses. I mistakenly thought that was limited to old Thai style wooden houses, fairly open to the elements. Well it turns out they like stone, brick and plaster just fine. They are by no means a plague, but occasionally you'll encounter one in the house, from less than an inch long up to 6 inches.
While they have some kind of suction to hang onto walls and even ceilings, occasionally they get distracted, or sweaty, or somehow lose their grip. This seems to embarrass them and as for us, well... Today at our friends house, where we still have our food (fridge coming Monday), I was closing the front door from the inside when something bounced off my head, shoulder and the floor, scampering away, all 5 inches of him/her. Only one of us screamed.
Actually, I didn't mind, since they are totally harmless (not to insects), my only concern that he/she had not shat on my head. In fact he hadn't, so, no harm no foul. They crap in neat little cylinders. Fortunately there are none on our floor, so there will be no picture.
At any rate, it was an experience neither "Jimmy" nor I will soon forget.
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